The Left Side Door is Always Locked

I think I will take a short break from my Kunming travelogue, if you don't mind. I'm stuck, you see. The words are already written down in my pretentious little Moleskine® notebook. There they are, perfectly visible, scribbled down in barely decipherable black ink. All I have to do is type the words. But they don't feel good on my fingertips, however many times I type and retype them. Lost in transcription, I guess.

To me, the hardest things to write about are the things that happened in the not-so-distant past. It's like retelling the joke you just told. The joke everyone laughed at. But somebody missed the joke. So you have to repeat the joke for this one inattentive dude, even as you ruin it for everyone else.

When you find yourself caught up in a story, you run that story through your mind so many times that it becomes too big to fail. Then, lo and behold, when you finally sit down to write the story, it fails. And you can't bail it out, however late into the night you filibuster, however many Starbucks stimulus packages you sneak past the House. The story fails. It fails because it's too big to fail, because it was never supposed to fail, because you never believed it could fail. It fails because it is a good story but you're not yet good enough to write it. It fails because you're too far away from the story to remember what it felt like when it happened, and because you're still too near to the story to comprehend what the hell it means.

I find it much easier to write about things that happened in the not-so-distant present. Like what happened just now. I can write about that. So that is what I will try to do. Something happened this evening, just a couple hours ago, though I'm not quite sure anything happened at all. Well, obviously, something happened. Something is always happening. But I'm not sure whether the events are related to one other, or whether I am stringing them together after the fact. Whatever. I'm writing this because I'm verbally constipated for the moment. I'm writing this, mostly, to see what happens when I write it.

It was round about midnight and I was on the prowl for beer, a couple bottles to unblock the aforementioned writer's block. The usual shops - the shops whose shopkeepers know what kind of beer I want - were all closed, shutters down. So I resorted to a back-alley shish-kebab place. I try to maintain a steady rapport with all the shopkeepers in my part of town, especially with this back-alley shish-kebab man who is ethnically Tibetan and therefore almost as foreign as I am. I tried to score a quick trio of takeout beers but the Tibetan invited me to sit. So I sat. I knew I would be there a while. A couple of college kids came dweebing into the restaurant and sat across from me. They didn't bother me. I sensed that they were not the usual Chinese undergraduate riffraff, so I offered them cigarettes. We got to talking.

They were not the usual Chinese undergraduate riffraff. They spoke no English, but they understood my Chinese - which is to say they possessed an uncanny knack for hand gestures and sound effects. Over the course of an hour, I successfully explained the existential impact of the Obama presidency, the ever-widening income gap in the Western world, the ominous rise of the Tea Party, the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords and the many reasons why it scared the shit out of me. The college kids, in turn, offered me some unusually candid opinions on Chinese politics. They, in turn, offered me some unusually candid Chinese cigarettes. They recommended some Chinese proxy servers, the better to access my own blog with. These kids were not the usual Chinese undergraduate riffraff. We feasted upon spiced pig brain - the first time I have ever eaten brain, believe it or not, in all my time in China. The pig brain was good, and I feel slightly smarter for having eaten it. When it was time to leave, I tried to pay the tab, but the college kids swatted my hand away. I tried to swat their hands away, but they swatted my swatting hand away. They paid the tab.

We parted ways. I was running low on cigarettes, so I hailed a cab. The cabbie was an old timer with a wife and a son, and he was awfully happy to talk about his son, a recent graduate of Sichuan Normal University. The cabbie stopped along the way to pick up a couple college kids waiting on the side of the road. There were two of them and one of me. I scooched over to the left back seat because the kids would have to get in from the right side. I knew this because in China, or at least in Nanchong, the left side door of the cab is always locked. I suppose the cabbies keep the left side door locked to prevent renegade drunks from bailing on the fare. Or perhaps if the cabbies didn't keep the left side door locked, Chinese Fire Drills would rage in the streets every time they stopped the cab. Truth be told, I don't know why Chinese cabbies lock the left side door. But the left side door is always locked. This is a rule and I have adjusted to it, as I have adjusted to so many other rules in China, as I have adjusted to so many other rules in Nanchong, often without knowledge, always without quite understanding.

The college kids eavesdropped on my sweet Chinese nothings and complimented my accent. The cabbie agreed that it was good. I contested that it was shit. Everyone laughed. I offered the college kids cigarettes and they thanked me. We smoked for a bit. The cabbie dropped the college kids off at the train station, then waited while I ran across the street to buy cigarettes. The cigarette vendor was all giggles and smiles to see me. She complimented my Chinese. I complimented her Chinese. She giggled and smiled.

On the ride home, the cabbie ran out of things to say. So I thought back on the dreams I'd had last night. It was a rough night's sleep as I remembered it. I had dreamt that I was back in Omaha, smoking a cigarette outside The Brothers on 38th and Farnam. My favorite bar. A cold and dark night. Breathing fog. Black ice everywhere. I smoked. I joggled my leg to the faintly audible bass line of the Roxy Music song I'd just put on the jukebox. I shoegazed. I gazed back up. A derelict was shambling my way. He pulled a gun. I threw up my hands. He shot me in the gut. I woke up in a cold sweat, as one does. Holding my gut. I was stunned, but I wasn't altogether surprised. This is one of many possibilities in America.

In China, among many other impossibilities, being shot down in the street is not a possibility. Never in Nanchong could I be held up at gunpoint. No, in Nanchong, one of China's most violent cities, I can troll the shady avenues in the shady hours to my heart's content and I will never be assaulted - or if I am, as I have been a couple times, it will not be at gunpoint, but at the feeble meathooks of a thoroughly drunk Chinese salaryman. For however much I loathe the place, I have nothing to be afraid of in Nanchong. And after months and months of homesick idolatry, that dream reminded me that in America - even in mild-mannered Omaha - I have a great deal to be afraid of, indeed. I can almost understand why so many creepy Americans linger around Asia for decades, extending their visas indefinitely. The Asian existence is an antlike existence, but if nothing else, it is a safe existence.

And there is the hospitality to consider. In America, a night like tonight would never have happened. Consider this: I walk into The Brothers for some beers-to-go. I'm wearing my pajamas, basically. Some college kids treat me to dinner and drinks. They pay the tab. They bid me farewell. They will never see me again. They ask for nothing in return. Impossible in America. A nightly occurrence in Nanchong. Granted, it's because I'm a foreigner. But that kind of hospitality doesn't exist in America. It's not that I seek out Chinese meal tickets. The Catholic guilt, in fact, is almost too much for me to bear. But it's such pleasant companionship. No pretensions. Just the amusingly futile attempt to understand one another over beer and spiced pig noggin. I know that once I leave Nanchong, these sorts of things will never happen to me, never again. I will go to hipster bars with my very best hipster friends, and each of us will pay our share. We will divvy up in the Dutch manner. At the night's end, a handshake, maybe a man-hug, and we drive home separately. In Nanchong, amidst all the xenophobia and cross-cultural weirdness, any sane interaction is a miracle. So those interactions verge on the divine, when they happen. Acts of generosity leave you overfed, half-drunk and breathless. But in America, I will find naught but good conversation, mutual respect and the occasional gun-wielding raving derelict. At this point, I'm not willing to say that either set of circumstances is better than the other. Instinctively, I prefer the American way. I miss my home. But at no point prior to tonight did I think that I would miss Nanchong. At no point prior to tonight did I even entertain the thought that I would miss Nanchong. At no point prior to tonight did I even dream of thinking that I would ever entertain the thought that I would miss Nanchong. But I suppose, pending tonight's dreams, that for the moment, very tentatively, I am willing to risk saying that I might yet dream to think that I will one day entertain the thought that I will one day miss Nanchong, Sichuan Province, People's Republic of China.

1/18/2011: A Writing Vacation

My one-man exodus was not to be. Not just yet, anyway. All roads to Kunming were sold out. So I settled on a 7 AM Wednesday morning departure. Let my people go, eventually. Let my children of Israel sleep off the hangover on a 24-hour train ride. Not such a bad deal, though. This extra day gives me time to fold my underwear. And it gives me time to think about what my little trip is going to be about.

A writing vacation. The words have been kicking around in my head for a while now. A writing vacation. What is a writing vacation? Have I heard those words before? I feel as though I have. But I'm not sure whether they constitute a proper phrase, whether the words "a writing vacation" are actively in use among modern day practitioners of non-Chinglish English. I haven't been home in a while. My English isn't what it used to be. I'm not sure whether a writing vacation is a cliché, or an expression that I have newly minted, right here on the spot. Whatever. It doesn't matter. Because I am set to embark on a writing vacation. That's all there is to it.

A writing vacation. I'm too lazy to Google it. So let's just assume that I have coined a phrase. Right here on the spot. If so, I reserve the right to define my coinage and redefine it as I go along. And so, pending future revisions:

1) A writing vacation does not necessarily entail writing. Nor does it necessarily exclude writing.

2) A writing vacation is not what happens when a writer goes on vacation. Nor is it what happens when a vacationer suddenly decides to take up writing.

3) That is to say, a writing vacation is not to be confused with Jack Kerouac loading up on amphetamines and setting off on a trans-American road trip. Nor is it to be confused with some Baby Boomer sporting a fanny pack and a Discover Thailand t-shirt who suddenly gets a fire up his ass to write the Great American Novel even as he's bankrupting the Carnival Cruise seafood buffet. Whatever a writing vacation may be, it is neither of those two things.

4) A writing vacation should include some writing. But it should include a great deal more lazing around cafes or bars, depending on the hour. It should also include much coffee or beer, depending on the hour.

5) The "vacation" component of a writing vacation needs not involve travel - not too much of it, anyway.

6) Hell, if anything, travel should be avoided on a writing vacation. A writing vacation should consist of two trips and two trips only: the trip out of Dodge, and the trip back to Dodge. A writing vacation means getting the hell out of Dodge and lingering around for a while in a slightly nicer place than Dodge, for a period of time just long enough to allow the writer to get his head screwed on straight before his inevitable return to Dodge. A hiatus. A sabbatical. A respite from Dodge, an escape of sufficient length to ensure that the writer will be able to write again when he gets back to Dodge.

7) So, if you accept premises one through six, a writing vacation boils down to this: the writer catches a long-distance vessel to someplace considerably warmer than his natural habitat. Once there, the writer shouldn't feel especially compelled to write. Nor should he avoid writing. No. The writer goes about his business. He scratches his junk when nobody is watching, if that is his wont. He farts. Belches sometimes. When nobody is watching. If that is his wont. He takes a load off. He loiters. He talks to strangers. He eats a lot more than he usually does. He drinks less than he usually does, because he is not writing as much as he usually does. So he doesn't have to drink as much as he usually does. But he still drinks prodigiously. Otherwise, his usual habits remain intact. He smokes, if that is his wont. He drinks coffee, then switches to beer at the crucial moment. He is relaxing, sure. Taking it easy. But mostly, he is on the lookout. On the lookout for something worth writing about. On the lookout for that svelte raven-haired girl in the wire-framed glasses. On the lookout for inspiration, if any of that sweet stuff is to be found just sitting out in the open. But mostly, the writer is changing his scenery. Rearranging his props. Mostly, he's just buying time before gravity pulls him back down into his usual ruts. Just buying time before he's séanced back home to haunt his old haunts once again. Buying time before his widening ass is coaxed back home to settle into the canyonesque ass-groove of his usual barstool at the Jack Bar in Nanchong. The writer is on his writing vacation, but he pictures himself back home. Round about closing time on a Tuesday night. That telepathic nod that means "gimme another beer, Liu Bao." The frowning wallet, the fuzzy math, the ritual paying of the tab. The insufficient dough. The IOU's. The IOU's. The IOU's. The writer needs a break from all the IOU's. The writer needs some UOI's. That is a writing vacation.

There will be writing on this writing vacation. But it will not be my usual writing. My usual writing is like a Prom date. She takes a long time to get ready, but comes out looking somewhat presentable. Or so I would like to think. But this writing will not dress up much at all. This writing isn't even going to the dance. No, this writing is going to O'Leaver's with the guys. Shirt half-tucked (half-untucked?), soy sauce grease stains everywhere. Cigarette burns on both thighs of his corduroys. No frills. Rest assured, this writing will not be driving itself home. Somebody call a cab. I am throwing away my bag of tricks. On this writing vacation, I will avoid introspection. I will avoid digression. Let this blog post be the most meta I get for the next week or two. What is the opposite of meta? Is there an opposite of meta? At any rate, this will be an opposite-of-meta writing vacation.

Lastly: On the Necessity of This Writing Vacation. Whatever else this writing vacation might be, above all, I feel that it is necessary. In Nanchong, I found myself sinking into one of those ruts that sucks and sucks until the rut is wide enough to swallow the wagon whole. I wrote every day, but I no longer felt like I was writing when I wrote - which is to say that nothing I wrote surprised me. I was no longer capable of surprising myself in writing. Which is bad news, indeed. I caught myself reaching into the same old bag of tricks. Writing was no longer a pursuit, or a journey. It was a habit. Like masturbation. Or smoking. It was just something I did. So with the murky abyss sucking my wheels down into the earth, I flogged and flogged those horses until the wagon finally lurched free. Yahhh!, I crowed. Yahhh! Without much forethought, I set us on a steady course towards Kunming. And now we're rolling south, rumbling south in search of green space, in search of new territory, new frontiers, and inevitably, new ruts to sink into.

A writing vacation. The ticket to Kunming is burning a hole in my pocket. Or perhaps it was the cigarette I just dropped on my thigh. Either way, from here on out, dear reader, the gloves come off. The tuxedo comes off. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword. Melville quietly takes to the ship. And wearing something like a smirk, the vacationing writer, on his writing vacation, dons his best tuxedo t-shirt.

1/17/2011: Loomings, et cetera

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick


hypo
noun, Archaic
hypochondria.

- Random House Dictionary

Don't call me Ishmael. Call me Panda. I read the better part of Moby-Dick in the bathtub of my childhood. Splashing around with a vinyl fleet of rubber duckies, making submarine noises, Johnson & Johnson No More Tears Shampoo, the whole deal. I was 24 years old at the time, and I was living at home. I had just returned to Nebraska after a year in South Korea. Between countries. I had little or no money in my manpurse and nothing particular to interest me on shore. In those tedious days of born-again infancy, I split my time between the bathtub and the coffee shop and the piss-tinged reading rooms of the Omaha Public Library. I read Moby-Dick for a living. I loved the book and loved it deeply. It had me at Ishmael. Eventually, I got myself a job. I was a scrivener, basically. But the job wasn't enough, and neither was hunting the White Whale. Wanderlust, restless legs, et cetera. I had to leave. But how?

Spoiler alert: Ahab and me, we didn't get the whale in the end. Sigh. The one that got away. After two full months in the tub with Melville, Moby-Dick was a hard book to put back on the shelf. I didn't want to stop reading it. As far as books go, it was a messy breakup. Herman started dating that pretentious asshat bartender at The Anchor Inn. In retaliation, I kept all of Melville's favorite sea shanty records. But several years down the road, I find myself returning again and again to that first chapter of his, the unimpeachable LOOMINGS - which just has to be the most bad-ass chapter title of all time.

Call me Ishmael, but that first paragraph of LOOMINGS rings truer to me than anything I have ever read. Especially when I read it for the first time, nestled there in my parents' upstairs bathtub. Grim about the mouth, indeed. A damp, drizzly November in my soul. An icy, windblasted January in Nebraska. I remember that winter well, however much I want to unremember it. The rocksalted roads led nowhere. The street lights were all flashing red. My gym membership had expired. So, too, had my library card. All relations with the fairer sex had come to naught. The cubicle work was sharpening my soul to a fine, shiv-like point. Rest assured I would have started knocking off the backwards "DEEZ NUTS" hats that were so en vogue amongst the Omaha frat boy community in those days, if I had stayed in Omaha any longer than I did. But I willed myself out of the country. I did some intercontinental ballistic job searching and found myself a teaching gig in Kielce, Poland. And in February, I left Omaha for a place that was even colder, even more miserable than Omaha. What can I say? My hypos got the upper hand of me.

Nanchong, Sichuan Province, People's Republic of China. Three years later. I am 27, somehow. The winter semester shuddered to a close sometime last week. The campus has been evacuated. The students are gone. I was relieved at first. As a bearded laowai, I am heckled, harassed, hectored and huckstered whenever I leave my apartment, mostly by students. So any set of circumstances that conspires to reduce my daily quota of degradation is a godsend. But with the departure of the students, the shops have closed down. The oldsters have gone home. And the outside world has become a very cold, very damp, very empty place, indeed.

The only open restaurant within walking distance of my apartment is a dingy little dumpling shop that is eternally sold out of dumplings. But nobody eats there. So my guess is that they don't bother making dumplings in the first place. This evening, out of desperation, I walked a half-mile to the Dumpling Restaurant of Woe and supped on a tiny plate of stale radishes.

"These aren't very good," the boss said as he slid them across the table. "Eat slowly."

He was right. They weren't very good. I ate slowly and left quickly.

There is one convenience store still standing. I go there for toilet paper, soap, shampoo, beer, smokes, snacks, water. These days, I go there for conversation. The boss always asks me if I'm going back to my hometown for Spring Festival.

"Probably not," I tell her. "Too expensive."
"Where will you go, then?"
"I dunno," I say. "Probably nowhere."

And so far, I have gone absolutely nowhere. I spent the first two weeks of the new year, the Year of the Rabbit, in Nanchong: reading, writing, taking long walks. Squatting in my apartment like a hen, with a space heater tilted upward towards my netherregions. I actually started reading The Bible, just because I had never read it before and figured that I ought to read it before I died. But somewhere around the end of Exodus, I began to wonder what the fuck I was doing with my time. Why am I here, I wondered - not in the broader existential sense, but like, why am I here in Nanchong when I don't have to be? I'll be stranded in China for seven more months, and then I will leave, almost certainly never to return. This is my last vacation in China. Let my people go, I said. The cruel Sichuanese winter had sunk in. Fog upon smog upon fog. A deep grayness. A damp, drizzly November in my soul. LOOMINGS, et cetera. Let my people go, et cetera.

I put down The Good Book. It was Sunday night and it was late. Let my people sleep, I said. I polished off my nightcap. I zipped my coat up tight, pulled the hood over my head, and I curled up into bed under two layers of sweater and two layers of blanket. A human burrito. I drifted off to sleep and I dreamt that I was in Yunnan Province. I was in Kunming, at a youth hostel. And I was sitting outside in the sun, across a table from a gorgeous raven-haired girl with black wire-framed glasses. We didn't talk because we didn't need to. We were in love. And we both knew what that meant. She was wearing a frilled white blouse and a purple skirt. I was probably wearing the same clothes I've worn for the past month. I forget. She didn't say a word and neither did I, but we knew. It was not an erotic dream, not at all. I never got past first base in the dream. Heck, I never left the on-deck circle. But the dream was more erotic than anything I have ever experienced. Nothing happened. We just sat there at the table, reading our respective books and understanding each other until I woke up. Groaning and babbling sweet nothings to myself, I tried to get back into the dream, but it didn't happen. In my experience, you can never get back into the dream. You just get shipped off to somewhere you'd rather not be. I fell asleep again and I dreamt I was walking along the edge of the Grand Canyon, wearing a backpack full of neutron star material. They say a spoonful weighs a ton. I kept falling over. Getting back up and falling over. Getting back up. Falling over. Eventually, I gave up walking and let myself tumble over the edge. I fell and I fell.

I woke up gasping for breath. After a while, I realized that I was very hungry. So I caught a cab to the McDonald's downtown and there, a very drunk Nanchonger grabbed me by the neck and threw me out into the street. Threw me right out into damp, drizzly Nanchong. A damp, drizzly November in my soul. Loomings. I decided right then that I needed to leave town. Let my people go, I said.

So, here is what will happen. Tomorrow, I will wake up around noon and throw my laundry in the washing machine. Then, wearing the same clothes I have worn for the past month, I will march right down to the front office of the China West Normal University Foreign Language Department. I will ask my boss for my passport, a vital document that I haven't seen in eight months. He will tell his underling to go find it, and his underling will tell his underling to go find it, and his underling will rummage around his employer's office for the better part of an hour, before discovering my passport in his coat pocket. He will open up my passport and laugh at my photo. I will thank him. Then I will return to my apartment, collect my laundry, wave it around a lot by way of drying it, and stuff it all in a plastic bag. Then I will catch a taxi to the train station. I will purchase a one-way ticket to Kunming, Yunnan Province. The train bureaucrat will ask to see my passport. I will show it to her. She will giggle at the photograph. I will thank her. I will while away the hours until departure in some bar. Then I will wait in line for a good long while. Then I will board a greasy chain-linked vessel bound for the south. I will lay me down in a cot some fifteen feet off the ground. I will read Hermann Hesse until I fall asleep. The next morning, I will wake up to the sun coming in through the window. Miraculously, I will wake up in a warm part of the world. I will step out onto the platform in Kunming and nobody will care none too much that I am a foreigner. And I will catch a cab and check into a youth hostel and squeeze the juice out of two weeks - lying out in the sun, eating greasy sandwiches, drinking coffee by day, imbibing beer by night, playing ping-pong with any and all comers.

Of course, I did the same exact thing last year. I went to Kunming last year. A year ago to the day. So I am retracing my steps. I am repeating myself. By escaping to Kunming, I am leaving one rut for another. But Nanchong dogs me. And this dream of mine haunts me. Being choke-slammed out into the damp, drizzly streets of Nanchong. And this raven-haired girl with the wire-frame glasses: who is she? Does she exist? My dreaming self has posed a question that my waking self must answer. I don't believe in dreams, but one never knows, does one?

I have never been a very good traveler. I never seem to make it to the places you're supposed to go see. I am an American who has never seen the Grand Canyon. Can't even imagine it. In all my time in Poland, I never made it to Auschwitz. I never did Day of the Dead in Pátzcuaro, though I was only a couple hours away from it. I've never seen the Great Wall or the Terracotta Warriors, and I probably never will. And on some level, I don't care. I don't really care to see those things. I don't chase places. I chase my own tail. I chase whims and vapors. Smoke and mirrors. I hunt the white whale. The raven-haired girl in the wire-framed glasses. The end is there in the beginning, and it's there for all to see. Because I will never catch the white whale, you see. Nobody ever does. But I'd like to think that I'll land a pretty damned hefty bass fish somewhere along the way. And it won't be the white whale. But I'll take it over a can of sardines. You know?

1/16/2011: McRumble

Sichuanese cuisine satisfies me without quite satiating me. Every day, I consume metric tons of fresh, nutrient-clogged vegetables. And they make me feel pretty damn nourished, those veggies. The antioxidants perhaps even counteract all the smoking and drinking I do when I'm not eating. But Sichuanese cuisine does not fill me. By the time 3 AM rolls around, when I'm tossing and turning and trembling in the subzero temperatures of my own bedroom, by then a colossal abyss has opened up in my stomach and my lone desire - more than warmth, more than sleep - is to fill that gastrointestinal abyss: to devour mass quantities of processed meat, and that right soon. So, on those nights, I will stumble out of my apartment in my pajamas, catch a cab to McDonald's, and there, I will devour two double cheeseburgers and a spicy chicken sandwich. Sometimes I order a Coke.

This is what happened last Sunday night. Around 3 AM, I caught a cab to the McDonald's downtown. I waited in the queue a bit. Several drunk college kids cut in front of me. I let them. This is typical. So was the drunk man over by the McDonald's Playplace, ranting at the fluorescent lights, brandishing a fist in front of his wife's face. Typical. If he didn't hit her, it would've been typical. If he actually hit her, it would've been typical. As a volunteer, I am not allowed to intervene. I can only watch. And I have been watching for just about two years now. Everything is typical to me. Being cut in line is typical. Domestic abuse is typical. I can do nothing to change things. I can only pretend that I don't exist. That way, I don't get upset when I am cut in line. That way, I don't get upset when a man beats his wife in public. Otherwise, I could get in trouble. Why, I could lose my visa.

When I finally got to the front of the line, I ordered two double cheeseburgers and a spicy chicken sandwich. I went upstairs to take a pee. And when I came back down, the drunk man was waiting for me. I juked around him and reached for my brown plastic tray and the delicious waxpapered bundles thereupon. And the drunk man grabbed me by the throat with both hands and started choking me towards the door. I threw him loose with an agility unknown to me. And I shoved him away. The first words out of my mouth happened to be English: "What the fuck is your problem, you drunk fuck?"

The drunk man charged, and immediately the McDonald's staff poured out of the kitchen. But they restrained me, not the drunk man. Four McDonald's employees descended upon me and dragged me outside, out to the street.

"But what about him?" I asked in Chinese. "He's drunk. I'm not. He wants to fight. I don't. Get him. I just want my burgers."

The McDonald's employees tried to keep me out, but I wriggled my way loose and stormed back into the restaurant.

"I'm hungry," I said.

As I approached the counter, the drunk grabbed me by the neck again and threw me back outside.

"Get out of here, foreigner!" he shouted. "Get out of here, white devil!"

His wife whispered apologies in my ear, but did not try to stop him. She just walked alongside as her husband choked me and screamed at me. Luckily, he was drunk. He was easy enough to shake off. The McDonald's employees, by then, were just trembling in the background.

"What's the problem?" I asked.
"You can speak Chinese," he gasped.
"A little," I said. "What's the problem?"
"What's the problem?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "What's the problem? Why did this just happen? Why are you so angry? You don't even know me. And you just tried to strangle me. I'm hungry. You threw me out onto the street."
He shuffled his feet around a bit, then looked up at me like a child, like I was his father.
"Well," he said, "my cell phone isn't working."

He took out his phone and slid the casing loose. He pointed at the battery. My phone isn't working, he said. And this was a big deal, apparently.

"Well," I said, "if you talk to the McDonald's employees in the kitchen, maybe they can help you. Probably, the battery's just run out. It's probably not that big a deal."

The drunk man was hanging on my every word. I could see that he was about to cry.

"Just ask them if they have a phone charger," I said. "They probably do."

He didn't apologize for anything, but he did as I said. I collected my burgers. I sat down in the darkest corner of the restaurant. The police showed up a few minutes later, and they helped fix up the drunk man's phone. I ate my burgers. And I left. Outside, it was cold and damp and raining just enough to freezerburn my bones. And that was when I decided to leave Nanchong for a while.

Happy New Year Every Day

I am finicky about music and literature, but when it comes to the visual arts, I am no more cultured than Joe The Plumber or Larry The Cable Guy or Liu Bao The Octopus Tentacle Vendor.

Like most men, I have endured my share of art gallery dates. And like most men, I felt compelled by the female anchored to my elbow to say something rather than nothing about the artwork on display. And so from time to time I have found myself waxing dilettante on "texture" and "depth" and "perspective" - things I knew nothing about then, and have persisted in knowing nothing about ever since. For one thing, visual art, like hockey, has never appealed to me as much as I feel like it ought to have. For another thing, I'm colorblind.

But there was one painting in particular that enchanted me, once upon a time. Naturally, it was black and white. A sketch, if you will. I discovered it during my senior year of college, in someone else's art history book. I have since forgotten who sketched the sketch, or whether the name of the sketcher/sketchist was ever known in the first place. I cannot, for the life of me, find the sketch anywhere. I have been googling the words "monochromatic medieval shitshow" for the better part of a decade, to no avail. So I can only remember the sketch. And I remember it sketchily, if you will.

The sketch hailed from the medieval days of yore, and was included in my friend's art history textbook by way of illustrating how texture and perspective and depth and what have you have evolved in the centuries since aforementioned medieval days of yore. The sketch was of a medieval village. A medieval village of, like, yore. The village was spread out across the canvas in two dimensions, roadmapwise, totally flat. No main characters, no depth, no one thing to focus on. An 11th Century Where's Waldo, minus Waldo. If the sketch had any perspective at all, it was that of a one-eyed helicopter pilot flying over the lowly fiefdom of Oafsville, England - A.D. 1043.

As I remember it: a couple of dudes in feathered caps jousting on horseback. A child chasing a pig. A man swordfighting a cloth dummy. The town drunk incapacitated, X's on his eyes, a toppled jug of ale at his side. A blacksmith doing blacksmithy things. A carpenter doing carpenter-like things. Nine ladies dancing. Eight maids a-milking. And one particularly jovial lord a-leaping, suspended in midair for all artistic eternity.

I appreciated the sketch mostly for reasons of camp. How quaint. How cute. How feudal. But it wasn't until my first New Year's in Chicago that I was able to make a metaphor out of it. If it was a metaphor that I in fact made. At any rate, it wasn't until New Year's 2007 that I was able to see a city in two dimensions, in black and white, from a great height, from a helicopter, in feudalistic terms.

I suffered somewhat en route to my arrival at the promised metaphor. The afternoon of my New Year's Eve in Chicago, my lady friend and I got lost in the Northwest Suburbs just as an apocalyptic Great Lakes snowstorm set in. When we first set off on our little stroll, it was cool and clear. An unsuspecting afternoon in the upper middle class projects. Then, within minutes, it was snowing so heavily that we couldn't see where we were walking. A blizzard. We blundered our way into a German graveyard and amused ourselves for a short time, brushing the snow off of tombstones, mispronouncing the names and speculating on the lives those people lived. But that got old fast, given the temperature. My Converse All-Stars were soaked through and frozen solid. So we tried to wander back to my friend Jeff's apartment, from whence we had come. But we succeeded only in sinking deeper and deeper into the morass of Midwestern suburbia. The Home Alonesque homes started to look like German tombstones. We had lost our way. We didn't dare to ask anyone to let us in. In accordance with the rules of Midwestern hospitality, we would gladly freeze to death in the gutters of the fruitily named parkways and boulevards of Mount Prospect before we stooped so low as to ask anyone for help.

We finally found refuge beneath the heat vent of an elementary school. The lukewarm mist reeked of corndogs and turkey ala king, but it was enough to sustain us for an hour or so. After an hour or so, I remembered that I owned a cell phone. So I called Jeff. Where are you, he asked. I have no idea, I said. Under a heat vent somewhere, I said. It smells like corndogs, I said. Not enough information, he said. So I left behind lady friend and deep fat fried warmth of heat vent and I cross country skied to the nearest street sign.

"Apparently, we are at the intersection of Willie Street ... and Memory Lane," I said.
"You're fucking with me," came Jeff's eventual reply.
"No," I said, "I shit you not. We are dying. On Memory Lane. And Willie Street."

Jeff, bless his recently Mormonized heart, Mapquested it. He pulled his Honda up to the intersection of Willie and Memory, just as the Chicago Public School district's underground supply of vaporized lard was running out. My lady friend and I sprinted through the snow. She made it to the car alright. But I stumbled over the kerb and slid for five-odd yards, tearing my corduroy suit coat to shit in the process. When I got in the back of Jeff's car, I was bleeding profusely from both lovehandles, but laughing, laughing - laughing at myself, laughing at the absurdity of it all, laughing even as I shivered away the last calories I had left in me. But I had paid two dollars for that suit coat and had worn it for a year consecutively, and I couldn't help but feel that part of me (the better part of me) had died with the death of that suit coat.

When we got back to Jeff's apartment, warmth was the thing. My lady friend took a shower, as that was the warmest place available. I trembled around the living room and made short work of a pair of White Russians. Then I took a shower. My toes burned as they thawed. I wept and bellowed with the burning. Jeff had to feed me a tallboy of Guinness through the shower curtain just to get me through the showering process. But when it was over, I felt ready to brave the cold again. I was young then. I braved cold then. Everyone pitched in to clamp my suit coat together with heavy duty Office Depot binder clips. And in that sorry state, I went downtown.

We went to a bar but couldn't afford to drink our way into New Year's 2007. So I was able to observe, somewhat objectively, Chicago on its worst behavior. I went out to the street shortly after the kazoos went off. I wasn't yet a smoker, so I just stood there watching. Here was Chicago. The Year of Our Lord, 2007. Happy New Year. Everyone seemed to be puking or slipping on puke. Twentysomething girls high-heeling it through piles of puke, stumbling, puking, stumbling through their own puke, skirts hiked up to expose gartered thighs, skirts unzipped to reveal tramp stampage. Puking. Stumbling through piles of puke. Throwing themselves unsuccessfully into taxis. Amateur frat boy rapists trying to scoop them up and throw them into taxis of their own design. Meanwhile: howling winds, swirling snow. Meanwhile: winos raging, hobos raving. It felt very much like the end of the world.

And there I was, soberly drunk, standing on the corner of Thompson and Grand with a road beer in hand, puzzled by the scene. Country boy Nebraskan that I am, I had heard of the apocalypse in scripture, but I had never seen it played out in reality. I was puzzled by the end of the world. Who knew it would look like this? Who knew there would be so many tramp stamps? And I was fascinated by it, just as I had been by that medieval sketch. I could only stand there and sip from my road beer and marvel. All I could think was, this is happening all over town. All over Chicago. All over America. All over the world, for all I knew. Everyone was puking. Slipping on puke. Throwing themselves into taxis. Jousting on horseback. Chasing pigs. Swordfighting with cloth dummies. Oafs. Serfs. The fiefdom of Chicago. For a moment, I could see the city of Chicago from a helicopter, from a thousand feet up - and from that perspective, it was a glorious first-world medieval shitshow, indeed.

I have made efforts to get myself to the nearest available megalopolis, the nearest available shitshow every New Year's since. I went to Seoul for New Year's 2008. I went to Chongqing last year, and I went to Chongqing this year. It's that top-down two-dimensional black and white perspective I'm interested in. I want to see an entire city on its worst behavior. I want to see the rapture reenacted time and time again, and I want to revel in the morning after, the waking up next to some strange woman, the knowing that we have survived it together, whoever she is. Whoever I am.

This year, I caught a black taxi to Chongqing on December the 31st. Not surprisingly, I had lazed around the apartment so long that, with luck, I would make it to Chongqing just in the nick of the new year. I made a couple phone calls and it was clear that some amount of catching up was in order, so I slipped a little something into my iced tea. I had hoped that nobody in the cab would notice. As it happened, the old dudes crammed into the backseat with me caught wind, and they wanted a swig. So we made merry in backwoods Mandarin until we fell asleep. And by the time I was deposited at whichever Chongqing Normal School I was bound for, my fellow passengers were still comatose and I was sober as a priest. Nay, sober as a Shaolin monk.

What followed doesn't warrant much description. Americans. Embraces. Fist pounds. A countdown. Smooches. There was a dog at the party. Somebody spilled beer on it. A kerfuffle ensued. But who cares? The new year cometh, cameth, had comethed, offering misbegotten promises of good behavior. 2011. The Year of the Rabbit. A year in which no one will deliberately spill beer upon dogs.

Somebody decided that we should go to The Club. I loathe The Club. I have never had a good time at The Club, not since I was young enough to be excited about getting into The Club. But everyone loves The Club for some reason. So we went. And predictably, we had a miserable time. It was crowded and sweaty, stuffy, short of oxygen. It was too loud to talk. I stumbled in and checked my coat. Two minutes later, I stumbled back out and unchecked my coat. Then I went down to the nearest shish-kebab vendor, bought a couple cans of beer, and walked back up to the balcony of The Club so I could watch the new year unfold from a somewhat great height, all of forty feet up, and I slouched there brooding and sipping canned formaldehyde from my perch overlooking the intersection of whatever and whatever streets. Shitshow Avenue and Memory Lane.

I tried to conjure up the usual Year In Review montages. 2010. The Year of the Panda. The year in which certain individuals deliberately spilled beer upon dogs. A year never to be repeated. But aside from that poor dog, I couldn't really remember anything about 2010. I didn't feel a thing about it. It was a year. My twenty-seventh on earth. I was happy to be rid of it. What a shitty attitude to take, I thought. You'll be standing on some balcony in 2011 thinking the same exact thing, I thought. What a shitty attitude to take. And I stood there for a minute, or perhaps an hour, slouched over the balcony, nursing a clandestine two kuai can of beer on the doorstep of a place that sold the same shit for twenty, and I kind of spaced out and murmured bad words to myself. Until a fight broke out in the streets below. With the first punch, I suppose, 2011 began.

There was a pudgy African fellow standing right in the middle of Shitshow Avenue. A Chinese man was punching him in the face. The African was trying to shield the blows, but already a crowd had gathered and several other Chinese men had started punching him, too. Before I could even process what was happening, a horde of people had enveloped the African man. A perfect storm of human beings. And at the eye of the storm: a pudgy African dude, and whichever Chinese dudes felt like taking a shot at him. The African fellow was not fighting back. He was trying to deflect the blows, but he was not succeeding. His assailants were not the same people involved in the initial scrum. They were drunk Chinese men, passersby who happened to be passing by, young men who were bored and drunk and down for punching a black man in the face, secure in the knowledge that all of Chinese Chongqing had their back. Happy New Year.

I have no idea what the African fellow did to deserve being mauled by the biggest city on earth. My Chinese intuition tells me that he must have done something to incur its wrath. Foreigners are stared at in this part of the country, they are heckled and they are cheated on cab fares, but they are seldom beaten down in the streets. So the man must have done something. Nevertheless, watching all of Chongqing gather around a public lynching was frightening. And the violence wasn't the most frightening part. The indifference. The amusement. I suppose the amusement was what disturbed me the most. It was a spectacle. It was an event. The beating dragged on so long that somebody could have sold tickets. People would've bought them. And somebody would have scalped those tickets. And so on. It went on for ten minutes. This African dude was punched in the face for ten minutes. He didn't or couldn't defend himself. And as a Peace Corps volunteer, I could do nothing but watch. Watch and stifle my vomit. Watch as the African man was pummeled in the face by random Chinese adversaries for ten minutes. Watch as he was finally thrown into the back of a police golf cart. Watch as the masses threw a last couple punches for good measure. Watch as the golf cart puttered its constipated way through the crowd. Watch as the man was pelted with beer bottles and half-eaten food. Watch and mutter bad words to myself, watch and then decide to go get myself a couple more road beers. Happy New Year.

Later – so much later that it felt like a new year altogether – we left The Club and made our way to McDonald's. I had a road beer tucked away in my jacket. I had just bought a pack of cigarettes, but upon entering Mickey D's, I was convinced that I needed another pack of cigarettes to get me through the two quarter-pounders I'd just ordered. So I wandered off to the nearest Chongqing Police outpost and asked them where I could buy cigarettes. They gave me a cigarette, then argued briefly about the proximity of the nearest cigarette vendor. By then, I had discovered the bundle in my butt pocket and realized that the whole venture was absurd: I already had cigarettes. But by then, a random Chinese drunk had stolen my road beer.

"No," I said in Chinese, "that's mine."

What he said back to me was unintelligible. But he held fast onto my beer and he swaggered away. Justice swelled in my gut. We were standing in front of a police outpost. I had had a beer. I no longer had a beer. It had been stolen from me by a man who clearly had plenty enough beer in his system. I wouldn't stand for it. I snatched my beer back from him and said, no. The beer is mine.

So he grabbed my arm, zoomed in on my hand, and with impeccable precision, set about twisting my pinkie finger. I could hear the ligaments groaning. I yelped, anticipating in that instant the fateful pop of broken bone. I shoved the drunk away, kicked him lightly in the ass, and rattled off some Chinese obscenities that I am somewhat proud of in retrospect. The man charged towards me, fists of fury a-flailing. He was subdued by the Chongqing Police. Then he was kicked and punched and thoroughly beaten by the Chongqing Police, right there in the street. A crowd gathered around to watch. I walked away very quickly. I went to the nearest cigarette shop, though I didn't need to buy any cigarettes. I just kinda asked the cigarette vendor how she was doing and walked back to McDonald's with my hard-fought road beer in hand and my tail between my legs. I felt bad about the whole thing at the time, and I feel bad about it in retrospect. A police beating, all because I went out for cigarettes I didn't need – a scrum over a road beer I probably didn't need, either.

Oh, well. I suppose that sometime in the distant future, medieval art will become en vogue again. Some post-postmodern sketch artist will sit down to tackle feudal Chongqing. And I will be trapped in charcoal amber, suspended on a canvas for all artistic eternity, road beer firmly in hand, X's on my eyes, a Chinese wino bending my pinkie finger to the breaking point, X's on his eyes, two police officers in full sprint, truncheons in mid-swing – and across town, across the canvas: a black-bearded foreigner pouring a full can of beer on a gorgeous chocolate lab - and yet further across the canvas, a black man being wailed on by hordes of Chinese men, rotten vegetables cascading through the air, hundreds of onlookers smiling and watching – and even further across the canvas, a young American hobo with a backpack and a daydream, a hobo who came to Chongqing for New Year's with a daydream and a backpack and a Z Visa, a hobo who won't realize what he's gotten himself into until a good year or so down the road.

Harmony Corps

Dear Family and Friends,

It has been a long time since I have written, and for that I am sorry. But between work, my host family (the Gustafsons), and life in the exotic frontier town of Omaha, my rice bowl is pretty full these days.

The Gustafsons are nice enough people and I really enjoy teaching at Metro Community College. But everything is so different here. It is not at all like Our China. After two full months in the Harmony Corps, I still haven't gotten used to life in the United States of America.

There is too much space and not enough people. The other day, I went to a supermarket called "Hy-Vee" and there was nobody there. It was just me and my shopping cart. I could hear the fluorescent lights humming. There was this scary music playing softly in the background. Everything was bright and clean. The fish was all prepackaged. The vegetables looked seriously ill. I couldn't find the ku-gua or the hua-jiao or the jiang. I found an employee and tried to describe what I wanted with my hands. She gave me a bushel of black bananas and something called a diaphragm. My Chinese-English dictionary tells me it is the muscle underneath your ribcage, but that is not what it looks like to me.

It's too quiet here. I can never wake up on time because the construction doesn't start until 10 AM. I can't sleep at night because there are these strange American bugs making noises outside. I asked Mr. Gustafson what the bugs were but he couldn't hear what I was talking about.

Americans are friendly. They don't stare at me or shout at me the way that people used to stare and shout at Mr. Panda. (I will have to ask him about that when I return.) But they don't really notice me, either. I am invisible here. Everyone smiles at me when I talk to them. And they like to talk a lot, mostly about the weather. But they all seem to be trying their best to hide some sort of mental illness. And some of them don't really hide it all that well.

Let me introduce my host family. Mr. Gustafson is very fat, even fatter than Second Uncle Liu. He is the size of two Second Uncle Lius. I asked Mr. Gustafson what kind of work he did and he tried to explain it to me, but I didn't understand. So we looked up the words in the dictionary together. There were six or seven words in his job title, and I knew them, but when we put them all together I still had no idea what he did.

"To be honest," I said, "I still have no idea what you do."
"None of us do, darling," he said. "None of us do."

Unlike Mr. Gustafson, Mrs. Gustafson is very thin. And unlike most American women, I don't think she has a job. When Mr. Gustafson is home, she follows him around with a broom and dustpan, sweeping up his crumbs. She does not like doing this. She never talks to Mr. Gustafson and he never talks to her, except to argue. One time I asked Mrs. Gustafson if she loved Mr. Gustafson and she laughed for a long time. Then she looked sad for a moment. Then she patted me on the head like a child. In the afternoon, when Mr. Gustafson is at work, doing whatever it is that he does, Mrs. Gustafson sits in the living room watching television. She watches soap operas, but she calls them her "stories." She drinks wine, but she calls it her "medicine." She also likes to smoke cigarettes. I sometimes fear that my own host mother is a woman of ill repute.

The Gustafsons have a son. His name is Kyle. I cannot tell how old he is. My host dad tells me that Kyle still wets the bed, which is strange to me, because Kyle has more facial hair than Grandpa Wang. He has more facial hair than two Grandpa Wangs. Kyle likes to wear silk shirts with dragons on them. Or maybe it is just one silk shirt with a dragon on it that he wears every day. He is very fat like his father. One time I asked Kyle why he wasn't married and he looked at me in a funny way. So I tried again and asked him why he didn't live in his own apartment like most American adults. He didn't want to talk about it. He got angry. He went to his room and slammed the door behind him. But he came back out a couple minutes later and sat down at the edge of my bed, and he watched me study English for a very long time.

The Gustafsons have a dog. Mr. Gustafson told me that it was a type of dog called a "rottweiler." The dog's name is Rascal. Rascal doesn't like me. He doesn't seem to like anybody, not even Mr. Gustafson. Rascal especially does not like Kyle Gustafson. I asked Mr. Gustafson why they owned such an unfriendly dog and Mr. Gustafson said, "protection."

"But what about all those guns you have?" I asked. "The ones in the attic."
"Protection," he said.
"Protection from whom?"
"From the bad guys," he said.
"But this neighborhood feels very safe," I said.
"Not anymore it ain't," he said. "Don't get me wrong. You're welcome here. The Chinese are welcome here. We're business partners." He brightened a bit, then darkened again. "But some people just ... ain't welcome."
Then he got quiet and drank from a very small glass and looked out the window for a long time.

I am very happy to know that I am welcome here in America.

I teach Mandarin Chinese at Metro Community College. My students are not like Chinese students at all. Many of them remind me of Kyle Gustafson: very fat, with dragon shirts. They never do their homework. They are almost always late. Some of them have never shown up for class at all. They are just names to me. A few of them don't seem to know where they are when they do show up to class. They keep looking around the room like, where am I? They ask me questions about Bruce Lee, and a lot of questions about Chinese politics that make me uncomfortable. None of them are very good at memorizing new vocabulary words.

But the girls in my class are friendly. They invite me to go out with them on the weekends. They call me "girlfriend" when we go out together. They like teaching me new words and they laugh whenever I say them. Last Friday, they took me to a city called Council Bluffs. Council Bluffs is located in the province next to Nebraska, a place they call Iowa. It was my first time in Iowa, and I never want to go there ever again.

The American word for KTV is "karaoke." But karaoke is not the same as KTV. As we all know, in Our China, we sing KTV with our very best friends, in a cozy little room, and we can stay there in that room singing as many songs as we want to sing. But in America, there are "karaoke bars," where you have to sing for people you don't even know, and you only get to sing one song.

My girlfriends really wanted me to sing, so I did. I asked the DJ if he had Di Yi Ge Qing Chen and he looked at me funny. So I asked if he had Jie Bu Dao. He shook his head. So I asked if he had Na Nu Hai Dui Wo Shuo and he said, "Sorry honey, but you're gonna have to speak American."

So I decided to sing "Take Me Home Country Road" by John Denver, the only English song I know. I did a good job, I thought, but everyone laughed at me. Probably because my English is so poor. My girlfriends were laughing, too, but they clapped for me when I sat down. Then they made me drink something they called "Jaeger." It tasted the way Mrs. Gustafson's medicine smells. Then my girlfriends asked me if I wanted to smoke.

"I don't smoke," I said.
"No," they said. "Smoke."

We went outside to the parking lot. It was very cold out there. It was snowing, in fact. Britney, one of the girls, lit a cigarette and passed it to the girl on her left hand side. Eventually, it came around to me. I didn't want to smoke it, but everyone told me that I had better smoke it. So I did. Everyone laughed when I smoked it. I don't know why. And I don't really remember what happened after that. I remember I started laughing at everything, even things that I didn't understand. I must have been very drunk. My girlfriends made me say dirty words and that made them laugh until they could no longer breathe. Then I got really hungry. My girlfriends took me to a local restaurant called "Taco Bell," and even though I don't really like Iowa Province, I have to say that Taco Bell is a really wonderful place. Sorry, mother, but it was probably the best meal I have ever had in my life.

Then we went to Britney's boyfriend's house. He lives there all by himself, with three dogs that are even meaner than Rascal. My girlfriends all smoked homemade cigarettes with him. They offered me one, but I said no thanks this time. Britney's boyfriend is named Dwayne. My girlfriends laughed at everything he said, and I think I understood him, but he didn't seem all that funny. In fact, he was kind of scary. His eyes were yellow. He was talking really fast and twitching all over the whole time. Then he would get quiet and look at Britney and they would go into the bathroom together. They would come back out a few minutes later and Britney would be twitching while Dwayne looked almost normal. But then he would start twitching again. So they would go back into the bathroom. This went on for a while, until finally Britney said something that got Dwayne so angry that he started calling Britney a lot of the words that she makes me say to make her laugh. He kicked one of his dogs in the ribs and went to his room. I told Britney that I had English class in the morning and I had to go. She wanted to stay. I needed to get home. The Gustafsons were worried about me, I said. I told her that I would get a taxi. She gave me a strange look. Something shattered in Dwayne's room and a dog came running out. There are no taxis in Council Bluffs, she said.

Yesterday I made some new friends. Or I tried to, anyway. They came right up to the Gustafsons' house and rang the doorbell. They were two nice looking young men dressed in suits, and they had a lot of books with them. They were students, I guess. They introduced themselves as Elder Micah and Elder Levi, though they didn't look all that old to me. They wanted to come in so I let them in. They sat down in the living room and I went to get them some tea, but they said they couldn't drink tea. So I sat down on the sofa across from them.

They asked me how I was doing and I said fine, thank you, and you? They said "good" in a way that really made me believe that they were doing pretty good. Then they asked me if I had been saved. I told them that yes, I felt pretty safe in the Gustafson household. I told them about the bad guys outside and I told them about Rascal, who even then I could hear trying to rip the basement door off its hinges. I told them about all the guns that Mr. Gustafson kept in the attic. They laughed a little and said, no, not safe. Saved. What's the difference, I asked.

They wanted to know where I was from and I told them "Nanchong" and asked them if they had heard of my hometown. They told me that no, they had never heard of it. They wanted to know what country I was from, and I told them "China." They were very interested in China.

"Do you have churches where you live?" they asked.
"Yes," I said. And I told them about the monastery on the West Mountain, and The People's Catholic Church down the street from our house.
"Do you go to church?"
"No, I have never been to the church," I said. "Do you go to church?"
They laughed a little and said that yes, of course they went to church. They asked me if I believed in God.
"I believe in science," I told them, "and I believe in the heroes of the People."
They nodded. This seemed to make sense to them.
"We like science, too. As a matter of fact, Elder Micah over here majored in physics at Bi-Wai-Yu." They laughed, so I laughed too. "Which heroes of the People do you believe in?"
"I believe in Chairman Mao," I said, "and Deng Xiao Ping, who grew up in Guang-an, which is only 45 minutes by bus from my hometown!"

They were unimpressed. They were still smiling, but they were nervous smiles that they wore. I must have said something wrong. They gave me a big black book and told me to read the first page. I tried my best. The writing was like Shakespeare, but not as pretty. I told them that my English was poor and that I couldn't really understand the words. So they started telling me a story about a nice man named Joe who lived in America long, long ago - back when there used to be Indians. They told me all about this Joe and how he did all these nice things for me before I was even born. It was a strange story, but an interesting one, and I was just beginning to make sense out of it when Mrs. Gustafson came into the room.

"Lily," she said to me, "who the fuck are these people and why are they in our living room?"

I could tell she'd had her medicine. The two young men seemed to recognize her. They got up off the couch and started towards the door. She grabbed Elder Levi by the collar of his blazer.

"What did I tell you? What did I tell you about coming to my house?"

The young men were apologizing and backing away. Mrs. Gustafson seemed to be looking around for a weapon, but the guns were upstairs in the attic. Rascal started barking up a storm. Then, something in Mrs. Gustafson's eyes seemed to click. She went over to the basement door and threw it open.

Elders Micah and Levi ran squealing out into the street. The screen door slammed shut behind them just in time. Rascal smashed his face against the window and barked so hard that he fogged up the glass. Then, after he'd worn himself out, Mrs. Gustafson kneeled down, hugged Rascal around the neck, and scratched him behind the ears.

"Good boy," she said. "Gooood boy."
Rascal growled.
"Mrs. Gustafson," I said, "who were those young men? Were they the bad guys?"
"No, Lily," she said. "They're just Morons."
Which I guess is a kind of American religion.

As if I'm not busy enough, I have to do something called a "secondary project." So I have been volunteering at the Omaha Zoo. It's a nice zoo. Very big, with lots of animals. But they don't have any pandas. What a pity. (There are some American pandas that live on our back porch. Mr. Gustafson calls them "fucking coons." Fucking Coons are like pandas, but much smaller, much dirtier, and not as friendly. Fucking Coons eat garbage instead of bamboo. Mr. Gustafson catches them in traps he builds himself and I'm not sure what he does with the Fucking Coons after that.)

Anyway, volunteering at the zoo isn't as fun as it sounds. I told the people in the employment office that I wanted to volunteer and they said okay. I told them I wanted to work with animals. And in a way, I guess I do. I work at a concession stand.

Earlier I said that Americans are friendly. But really, they are only friendly when they are well-fed. The Americans I serve at the Sea Lion Concession Stand are even meaner than Third Uncle Zhang when he drinks. I never seem to do anything right. I can't seem to put enough cheese on anything. Everything is too hot, or too cold. Or it's too spicy. My English is so poor that nobody understands me and I don't understand them. One fat old man got so angry with me when I gave him a Mr. Pibb instead of a Dr. Pepper that I thought he would have a heart attack. Then he did have a heart attack. Now there is something called a "lawsuit" pending in court, but Mr. Gustafson's lawyer tells me I can plead "diplomatic immunity." Mr. Gustafson and I looked up the words in the dictionary together and I understood them both, but I still don't know what they mean put together.

Today, Kyle lifted up his shirt to show me his tattoo, which he called a "tatt." (Maybe this is local Nebraskan dialect. I will ask my students tomorrow.) Oddly enough, it was a Chinese tattoo. He asked if I knew what it meant and I said no. He told me that it meant "virility." I didn't tell him it meant "duck penis." Then he told me that he had some bad news. He started looking like he was about to cry. I asked him if he was okay and he said no. He told me that he was very sick.

"Do your mom and dad know?" I asked.
"Nobody knows," he said. "Except me. And now you, I guess."
"What's wrong?"
"I'm afraid it's – " He sniffled. "It's – yellow fever."
"Oh my God. Is it serious?" I asked.
He nodded.
"Oh, yes. Very serious."
"Are you dying?"
"Every day I die a little more," he said, and put his hand on his heart. And I noticed for the first time that his silk dragon shirt was unbuttoned halfway, and that unlike most American men (and some American women), Kyle had no chest hair.
"It is winter," I said. "You should wear more clothes."
He seemed embarrassed.
"Yeah, I guess I should."

He went back to his room and shut the door. I stayed up studying English, and the light under his door was on all night. I have no idea what he does in there all by himself. He is always in his room by himself, making little noises. Anyway, I'm worried about Kyle. I looked up yellow fever on Baidu, and it says that if he doesn't get medical help, he could die in as soon as three hours.

I should go. Mrs. Gustafson wants to have "Girl Talk" again, which is something we do every Tuesday afternoon. Girl Talk is usually just her talking and smoking a lot of cigarettes and taking a lot of medicine and crying a little at her stories and then crying a lot in my lap about things I don't understand. She is not a girl and I don't really get to talk. So why do we call it Girl Talk? I don't understand that, either. I guess it is just another part of American Culture. I have so much left to learn.

Happy Every Day,
- Li Li